Of the political world, abolition the interminable radicalization of every

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wilderson the lynching in alabama the mob murder of a transit worker in brooklyn the murders of fourteen women in boston feeling that this is evidence of something and that there must be a lesson in all of this—I thought murder was legal (Balagoon 95)
Balagoon’s poem is an example of the necessary thing that Evelyn Williams noted—the kind of performative gesture the BLA political prisoners were famous for. It demonstrates how the court is systemically implicated in the ongoing Black holocaust. But as a testimony it is incomplete—not in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality. Its deepest insight is the conclusion that it reaches that the law is White, coupled with the inference that Balagoon was guilty prior to the Brinks expropriation. His innocence cannot be vouchsafed until all semblance of the law has been eradicated. The poem’s closing line, I thought murder was legal locates the court at the end of a metonymic chain of hate crimes, and thus, politicizes the presumed impartiality of the pending violence—the life sentence about to be handed down. Such counter-hegemonic gestures are part of a process that Gramsci describes as the War of Position’s isolation and emasculation of ruling class values. But the Gramscian model breaks down because the subjects of the poem (Black people) are not Gramscian subjects. From the poem we get a sense that Black people are being killed because they are Black people. This is different from the Gramscian subject who is killed because she goes on strike or lays siege to a factory. Another spanner in the Gramscian works is evident in the way the deaths are narrated. The body count Balagoon offers reads like a report on holocaust atrocities through which we get no sense of the people who existed before the holocaust or the impacts of this holocaust on their polity, their cosmology, their structures of feeling, or the capacity of their offspring to goon living.
Kuwasi Balagoon’s testimony is incomplete because taxonomy can itemize atrocities but cannot bear witness to suffering, and a conceptual framework of redress is contingent upon a subject’s capacity to bear witness. The structural violence that positions

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The Vengeance of Vertigo
Balagoon paradigmatically
10 makes the degree of psychic integration required in order to bear witness all but impossible, thereby undermining the status of his claims at the level of identity and, by extension, undermining his capacity to offer a testimony on trauma or a narrative of redress, be it juridical or political. I am humbled by the courage and tenacity it must have taken to use the space and time allotted to them for reading atrocities into the public record often at the expense of adjudicating the charges levied against them. But the reportage of atrocities is just that, reportage laden with spectacle and light on sustained meditations on trauma. How can a sense of redress—juridical or political—emerge from a context where sustained meditations on trauma have no purchase?

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